Commentary

U.S. bishops relaunch ‘Civilize It’ initiative

During the last presidential election cycle, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) launched a new initiative entitled “Civilize It.”

The purpose of the initiative was to ensure that focus during the election cycle was given not only to the issues and candidates being debated, but also to how to engage in civil and charitable dialogue on what are often controversial political matters. In short, the U.S. bishops wanted to make sure Catholics were equipped to be and act as Christians in the public square, a place where noise and division too often abound. While the initiative’s resources were few, it was nevertheless important, impactful and insightful. It provided the basic tools that any person should have when discussing any topic, most especially politics. It underscored the importance of listening to understand those you are speaking with – especially your political “opponents” – and from this place of listening to be able to delve more deeply and authentically into the issues. As we prepare for the midterm election cycle, the USCCB is relaunching their “Civilize It” initiative. As stated in its promotional materials, “As a Church and a nation, we are polarized and divided. Pope Francis challenges us to respond to building a ‘better kind of politics, one truly at the service of the common’ (Fratelli Tutti, no. 154). We are called to overcome division, promote encounters with our neighbors, and seek the truth.” It is the desire of the U.S. bishops “to assist Catholics to counter polarization and division in Church and society by following the example of the Good Samaritan, who challenges us to ‘become neighbors to all’ (Fratelli Tutti, no. 80).” Our political discourse is rife with toxic exchanges. Vile exchanges of communication in the context of politics are an age-old problem, one that has only been exacerbated by social media. But there is no reason this must be the norm – there is always hope and redemption. “Civilize It” seeks to flip this dynamic by calling on Catholics to be leaven in the culture. “Civilize It” invites us to enter into the fray of political discourse and to reveal a “better kind of politics,” a politics that respects the other person and does not seek to vilify them or their sincerely held beliefs. “Civilize It” seeks to charitably meet people where they are, create a culture of human encounter between persons, and from that position strive toward a mutual understanding of the truth and how we can best strive for the common good. If you, like me, have the tendency to be quick to judge or cast aspersions on your political “enemies” and find it difficult to be civil and charitable in how you conduct yourself during political debates and discussions, then I think you would do well to visit CivilizeIt.org and give some of the resources a look. Take them to prayer, give

Faithful, Watchful Citizens

TOM VENZOR

Civilize It: A Better Kind of Politics isanonpartisaninitiativethatseeksto assistCatholicstocounterpolarizationanddivisioninChurchandsocietyby followingtheexampleoftheGoodSamaritan,whochallengesusto“become neighborstoall”(Fratelli Tutti,no.80).

RespondtoPopeFrancis’calltobuild“ abetterkindofpolitics,onetrulyat theserviceofthecommongood”(Fratelli Tutti,no.154)bypledging:

CHARITY

CLARITY

CREATIVITY

Learn more and commit to #ABetterKindofPolitics at civilizeit.org.

USCCB A promotional flyer for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ “Civilize It” initiative encourages Catholics to visit the CivilizeIt. org website.

them a read and periodically return to them over the next year as our nation enters, once again, into the fray of election politics. As always, share them with family, friends, parishioners, political friends and adversaries, and anybody else in need.

Tom Venzor is executive director of the Nebraska Catholic Conference. Email him at tvenzor@necatholic.org.

Health education standards postponed – for now

Despite overwhelming opposition, the Nebraska Department of Education (NDE) dragged Nebraskans into another month of debate about their proposed Nebraska Health Education Standards.

State Board of Education meetings have become dramatic, as board members tussle over procedural matters, citizens take the mic for public comment to expose a dysfunctional system, and two drafts of deeply flawed ideological content are scrutinized. None of this need to have happened; the NDE chose to pursue this work. More incredibly, they have prioritized it during the pandemic as families and schools are in crisis.

Unfortunately, Nebraska is not immune to a wellfunded national movement to sexualize children, infringe on parent rights and normalize contraception and abortion. Local and state school boards around the country have become epicenters in the battle over a simple question: Who are the principal educators of children? As people of faith, we know there’s no debate. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is clear: Parents and guardians are the primary educators of their children (no. 2223), and we demand the government honor this. It is no surprise that from day one, the Nebraska Catholic Conference (NCC) has strongly opposed the comprehensive sex and sexuality education (CSE) sections embedded in the first two drafts of the proposed health standards. At the NCC’s website, necatholic.org, you can find a breakdown of the troubling content from March’s first draft. It included topics like gender fluidity in first grade, sexual orientation in third grade, hormone blockers in fifth grade, anal and oral sex in seventh grade, contraceptives in eighth grade, and much more. Despite significant cuts, the second draft released in July still contained CSE. For instance, seventh graders are taught that “sex and gender identity may or may not differ”; multiple obfuscations regarding sexually transmitted infections and “healthcare facilities” more than hint at Planned Parenthood involvement; and puberty blockers are barely hidden behind weak smokescreens

Faithful, Watchful Citizens

JEREMY EKELER

beginning in fourth grade (children are asked to consider how they can “manage” puberty). Our website also includes NCC feedback on this second draft. Fast-forward to the State Board of Education’s Sept. 3 meeting, where a proposal was made by the NDE’s Learning Committee to postpone all work on the health standards. Their empty rationale was that the health standards are distracting from COVID-related educational priorities. Recall that the NDE chose this work and forced the issue upon Nebraskans in the middle of the pandemic. This pause on the development of the health standards is not about COVID; it is about an ideological agenda that had hit a wall of prayer, parent voices and reason.

In a show of their internal priorities, the board meeting was rife with board member pontification, the reading of internal emails detailing collusion with political activists, and debate that both displayed rifts within the board and critically questioned the accountability of the NDE to process and transparency. Ultimately, the board voted 5-1-1 (one absent) to postpone the work. Visit our website to see how your State Board of Education member voted.

SIMEZ78/SHUTTERSTOCK The first two drafts of the Nebraska Department of Education’s proposed health standards contained sections on comprehensive sex and sexuality education, which the Nebraska Catholic Conference strongly opposed.

While many celebrate this postponement as a victory for parental rights, we must remain vigilant. The health standards are shelved, not trashed. Board members, activists and the NDE will resume the health standards with a plan. Be on the lookout for updates and action items. Pay special attention to upcoming local elections. To conclude, I’d like to share some nuggets that have been exposed during this process. First, we know that the NDE actually began work on the health standards in the fall of 2019. This means they have placed energy and resources behind ideological CSE standards for two years, even as COVID has crippled schools. Secondly, the NDE has misled us: They initially claimed this work was not about CSE, but now they and their supporters embrace it. Next, political activists like Women’s Fund of Omaha and Out Nebraska were invited to write and advise on the standards, while educators and experts who advocate for traditional marriage and abstinence were deliberately excluded. We all must demand more of the NDE and our State Board of Education. Transparency in process and content, as well as parent empowerment, are vital as we proceed. Finally, continue to pray for our children, our families, the NDE and the State Board of Education.

Hannah Arendt, totalitarianism and the distinction between fact and fiction

Iam currently making my way through D.C. Schindler’s marvelous book, “The Politics of the Real: The Church Between Liberalism and Integralism.” This text will be of interest to anyone passionate about the vexed and much-discussed issue of the relation between religion and politics.

But I would like to draw particular attention to the epigram that Schindler chose for his book, an observation that is meant to haunt the minds of his readers as they consider his particular arguments. It is drawn from the writings of Hannah Arendt, the 20th-century GermanJewish scholar most famous for her lucubrations on the phenomenon of totalitarianism, and it is of remarkable relevance to our present cultural conversation. She said: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between the true and the false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

OBJECTIVE TRUTH AND GOODNESS

We might define totalitarianism as the controlling of every aspect of life by the arbitrary will of a powerful individual or group. If this is accurate, we see why Arendt worried about the blurring of distinctions between the real and the unreal, between truth and falsity. The objectively good and the objectively true have their own intrinsic authority – that is to say, they command, by their very excellence, the obedience of the receptive mind and the responsive will. So, for example, in the presence of mathematical truths, scientific data and philosophical arguments, the mind surrenders, and rejoices in its surrender. It does not arbitrarily impose itself on things as with totalitarianism; rather, the intrinsic truth of things imposes itself on the mind and thereby awakens it to its purpose. In the language of St. Thomas Aquinas, the intelligibility of the world actualizes the mind.

In a similar way, the intrinsic goodness of things engages, excites and actualizes the will. Aquinas said that the will is the appetitive power corresponding to the intellect, by which he meant that the good, understood as such, is automatically desired. The point is that, once again, the subjective faculty does not impose itself on reality, making good whatever it wants to be good; rather, on the contrary, what is densely and objectively good commands the will by its own authority. And as I have argued often before, this acquiescence of the will is not a negation of freedom but the discovery of authentic freedom: the same St. Paul who said that he was a slave of Christ Jesus also said that it was for freedom that Christ had set him free. That apparent contradiction is in fact the paradox produced by the fact that the will is most itself when it accepts the authority of the objective good.

UNDERMINING OBJECTIVITY

Now, does anyone doubt that we are living in a society that puts such stress on the feelings and desires of individuals that it effectively undermines any claim to objectivity in regard to truth and goodness? Does anyone doubt that the default position of many in our culture is that we are allowed to determine what is true and good for us? Some years ago, as part of a social experiment, a five-foot, nine-inch white man went on a university campus and randomly asked students passing by whether they would consider him a woman if he said he felt he was a woman. A number of students said they were OK with that. Then he inquired whether they would accept that he was a Chinese woman, if that’s what he claimed to be. One student answered: “If you identified as Chinese, I might be a little surprised, but I would say good for you – be who you are.” Finally, he wondered whether they would agree that he was a six-footfive Chinese woman. This last suggestion seemed to throw his interlocutors a bit. But one young man answered: “If you . . . explained why you felt you were six-foot-five, I feel like I would be very open to saying you were six-foot-five, or Chinese, or a woman.” Do you recall the AcademyAward-winning film “The Shape of Water,” in which a woman falls in love with an aquatic creature? The title of that movie gives away the

Word on Fire

BISHOP ROBERT BARRON

IGOR GOLOVNIOV/SHUTTERSTOCK Adolf Hitler greets adoring fans from a convertible during World War II in Germany. According to German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between the true and the false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

game: a dispiriting number of people in our culture feel that the only shape is the shape of water – which is to say, no shape at all, except the one that we choose to provide.

DOOR TO TOTALITARIANISM

With all of this in mind, let us return to Hannah Arendt. What opens the door to totalitarianism is, she thought, the radical indifference to objective truth, for once objective value has been relativized or set aside entirely, then all that remain are wills competing for dominance. And since the war of all against all is intolerable in the long run, the strongest will shall eventually emerge – and inevitably impose itself on the other wills. In a word, totalitarianism will hold sway. Notice, please, that one of the features of all totalitarian systems is strict censorship, for an authoritarian regime has to repress any attempt at real argument – which is to say, an appeal to an objective truth that might run counter to what the regime is proposing. The great Václav Havel was the first president of the Czech Republic after the break-up of the Soviet bloc and a famously dissenting poet who had been imprisoned for his positions against communism. He commented that, through his writings, he had opened up a “space for truth.” Once that clearing was made, he said, others commenced to stand in it, which made the space bigger, and then more could join. This process continued until so many were in the space for truth that the regime, predicated upon the denial of truth, collapsed of its own weight. I do believe that we are in a parlous condition today. The grossly exaggerated valuation of private feelings and the concomitant denial of objective truth and moral value have introduced the relentless war of wills – and evidence of this is on display in practically every aspect of our culture. Unless some of us open up a space for truth and boldly stand in it, despite fierce opposition, we are poised to succumb to the totalitarianism that Hannah Arendt so feared.

Bishop Robert Barron is auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and founder of Word on Fire, a global media ministry. See wordonfire.org.

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Vatican diplomacy can make a difference

This past June 25, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Holy See’s Secretary for Relations with States – usually dubbed the “Vatican’s foreign minister” – told a press conference that he and his colleagues didn’t believe that the Vatican’s speaking out publicly on the massive repression underway in Hong Kong “would make any difference whatever.” I beg to disagree. Vocal Vatican advocacy for such basic human rights as religious freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of the press in Hong Kong could indeed make a difference. Let me count the ways.

It would make a great spiritual and morale-boosting difference to courageous Hong Kong Catholics like my friend Jimmy Lai, currently in jail, and the noble pro-democracy barrister Martin Lee. These men rightly wonder why the sounds of silence prevail in Rome while they are being persecuted, prosecuted and imprisoned for living the truths taught by the Lord they follow and the Church they love.

It would make a considerable difference to hard-pressed Catholics in both Hong Kong and mainland

The Catholic Difference

GEORGE WEIGEL

China. Many of these brave men and women feel abandoned by the Church’s central authorities, and they wonder why. They understand that what the Chinese communist government wants is not “dialogue” with the Vatican but the complete subordination of Catholicism to the Chinese party-state and its program of “Sinicizing” all religion. They do not accept the notion that truckling to totalitarians like Xi Jinping will eventually improve their situation, because they know that their struggle, like the Church’s struggle in central and eastern Europe after World War II, is a zero-sum game: someone is going to win, and someone is going to lose.

It would make a difference to the future of evangelization in China. The Chinese communist regime is not immortal. When it goes, as it inevitably will, China will become the greatest field of Christian mission since the Europeans came to the western hemisphere in the 16th century. Comparative advantage will lie with those Christian communities that resisted the loathsome regime that

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Hong Kong entrepreneur, publisher and pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai heads to court Dec. 2, 2020, to answer fraud allegations. He was first arrested the previous August for alleged collusion with foreign forces – a crime under Hong Kong’s new China-imposed national security law. In April 2021, he was sentenced to 14 months in prison for “unlawful assembly” related to his role in a number of 2019 protests.

collapsed, not with those that tried to find an accommodation with the unaccommodating. Shortly after Archbishop Gallagher’s remark, National Review editorialized in these terms: “In the future, when China is a free country, it will look back with nothing but disgust on the innumerable American corporations, institutions and celebrities that helped enable authoritarian rule under some cockamamie misconception that the Chinese people are perfectly content to live indefinitely without the basic freedoms we have taken for granted for more than 200 years.” No Vatican diplomat should want similar contempt to fall upon the Catholic Church.

It would make a difference in restoring the moral authority of the Holy See in world politics. The Vatican has no real power, as the world understands power. Its capacity to shape events, either behind the scenes or at the table of international negotiation, is entirely dependent on the moral leverage it can apply, especially in difficult and seemingly intractable situations. Thanks to the bold public witness of Pope St. John Paul II, such moral leverage was instrumental in shaping the revolution of conscience that preceded and made possible the Revolution of 1989 in east central Europe. Vatican moral authority was also crucial in resisting Clinton Administration efforts to have abortion on demand declared a basic human right at the 1994 Cairo World Conference on Population and Development. In both instances, speaking boldly, publicly and forcefully made a real difference, turning moral teaching into moral and political leverage. If that lesson has been forgotten in the 21st-century Vatican, it needs to be relearned.

It would make a difference in promoting the Church’s social doctrine, which is too often a matter for the classroom rather than the public square. The resistance Church in Hong Kong and China is not taking its cues from John Locke and Thomas Paine; it is living the basic tenets of Catholic social doctrine and its understanding of the right relationship between Church and state. That social doctrine has applications far beyond China, of course. But if it is seemingly ignored by the highest Church authorities in the hardest cases, then it remains of interest to academics only.

It would make a difference in bringing Luke 22:32 to life in the contemporary Church. The Lord instructed Peter to “strengthen” his brethren. Peter’s brethren in Hong Kong do not feel strengthened by Peter and his closest collaborators in the Vatican today. They feel something quite the opposite. And that is perhaps the gravest reason why the Holy See should reconsider the sounds of silence with respect to Hong Kong and indeed all of China.

George Weigel is distinguished senior fellow and William E. Simon chair in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.